Shiv-Rani Mistry

I am a Design Engineer. I fuse design thinking with engineering practise within a culture of innovation and enterprise. I am engaged in utilising strategic design practises to develop products, services, systems, and experiences that can be commercialised to transform businesses of today.

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Degree Details

Global Innovation Design (MA)

I entered Design Engineering because I liked taking products apart, seeing how they worked and to find out whether I could improve the design of them. How could I redesign this to improve its quality? How could I redesign this for faster manufacturing time? How could I redesign for this to be more sustainable?

I liked problem solving.

After five years of design engineering, I still like problem solving, however, by now I have the skills to make sure that my designs are not only feasible and viable, but desirable as well.

Strategic Design to Implement Solid Shampoo into Luxury Hotels

Strategic design to increase perceived 'luxury' value

Empathise1 — Analysing empathy map against Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Empathise2 — Understanding the end customer, the hotel guest, expectations of a luxury hotel experience.How might we translate these expectations into a bar of soap?

Define2 — Defining the problem with the soap dispenser initiative through user journey

Define3 — Defining the existing ecosystem between soap manufacturers and the hotel operations

Ideate1 — Concept generation from hotel expectations

Ideate2 — Concept walkthrough with hotel guest and re-establishing ecosystems

Evaluate — Evaluation matrices to ensure generated concepts meet the feasibility, viability and desirability requirements

Test — Testing generated concepts with users, analysing quantitative and qualitative feedback to improve and iterate strategy

Optimizing Luxury hospitality and Sustainability

Optimizing the desirability, feasibility and viability of shampoo bars for Luxury Hotel toiletries. Marriott International undertook an initiative ‘to reduce landfill waste by 45%’ by 2025, by replacing single-use toiletry bottles with large soap dispensers, reducing Marriott’s global environmental footprint. Whilst Marriott International’s Select and Long Stay hotel collections have embraced the dispenser scheme, the Premium and Luxury hotel collections have been reluctant plausibly as soap dispensers fail to deliver luxury hospitality to their guests.

The hospitality industry is human-centric, thus it could be argued that the guest experience should take precedence over sustainability when addressing single-use plastic wastage within hotels. How might we optimise existing single-use plastic solutions to be desirable to hotel guests and feasible and viable for hotel operations?

The approach focused on empathising with hotel guests through a variety of design tools, to answer the following questions. What are the guests expectations of a luxury hotel experience? Why is it important for the guests that these expectations are met? How might we translate these luxury hotel experience expectations into a bar of soap? Each generated concept was evaluated against a matrix, to ensure that the solution was not only desirable to a hotel guest, but was also feasible and viable to the operations of a hotel.

The aim of this project was to develop a universal strategy to implement bar soap as a solution to single-use plastic wastage without negatively impacting the hotel guests luxury experience for all soap brands. It is proposed that hotel guests should be provided with an array of luxury branded miniature bar soaps. The array is composed of different product ranges, each product range offering a new experience. The strategy increases the perceived value of a basic commodity through addressing price, quality, prestige, hedonic value, such that implementing solid forms of soap into hotels can be implemented into a hotel, delivering a luxury and sustainable hotel experience.

Symbio CleanUp — Diagram illustrating how the larvacean creatures collect and eat microplastic in their self-produced filters. The filters filled with microplastic are collected by our drone.

Symbio CleanUp — Simulation of Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV)

Symbio CleanUp — Video to visualise the speculative future.

Strategic design to incentivise the younger generation to become proactive to help the environment. A future world was envisioned where a symbiotic relationship exists between humans and sea creatures, to remove plastic from the ocean together. Symbio CleanUp focuses on building an emotional connection between humans and the larvacean sea creatures, such that the younger generation develop a sense of responsibility to save the planet.

The emotional connection is achieved through an gamified approach, allowing children to play an online game which collects the disposed filters of Larvacean creatures for gamer points. Through this game, the children grow fondness towards the Larvacean creatures, and learn the science behind the biological ecosystems, the breakdown of plastic, and why it is important for us as a society to actively address the plastic issue.

Cover of a Guide to Designing a Female for Engineering

A Guide to Designing a Female for Engineering — Companies want more female engineers to improve gender equality statistics, but increasing the number of female engineers is more complex that manufacturing products

A satirical guide that provides an insight into the Engineering sector from the viewpoint of several female engineers, identifying the common experiences, stereotypes and expectations of most Women in Engineering.

PROJECT AIM : To answer the question “What characteristics and experiences make the easiest transition for women to enter the engineering field?”

PROJECT OBJECTIVES: To produce a Product Design Specification for the product of a “Woman in Engineering” for engineering companies. To provide an insight into the requirements of the makeup of current women engineers by analyzing data from self-conducted focus groups, interviews and published articles.

Following the terminology of engineering, by defining specifications and requirements, the dissertation provides insights into how women currently experience the world of engineering.